Although animals were so often treated cruelly, there were instances of kindness: ‘Mr. Willm Custance also called here but did not come in,’ Woodforde recorded in November 1799, ‘a favourite spaniel of his by name, Dash, having his leg broke by another dog in pursuit of a hare near us. My nephew assisted him in binding up the leg, with a bandage and splices of wood, and bathing it with vinegar.’46 When all else failed, injured animals were killed. Like most country people, Woodforde allowed his dogs to wander: ‘In the afternoon my dog Pompey came home shot terribly so bad that I had her hanged directly out of her misery. My greyhound Minx who was with her did not come and we suppose she has met with the same fate.’47 The next day Minx returned, ‘very much shot in one side, but I hope not mortally. They were both shot by black Jack [a gamekeeper].’48 Stray dogs were a common sight and could pose a real hazard as rabies was prevalent. John Byng also loathed their constant barking, as on one occasion in Lincolnshire: ‘This morning I was awaken’d by the barkings and fightings of dogs, upon the market place; such nuisance, and noise is intolerable: one dog can disturb a whole town.’49
For dog bites and other serious injuries to people, a surgeon might need to be called in. The Whitworth Doctors boiled up salves in their workshop for treating wounds: ‘In the shop stand two jars containing four gallons each; the one filled with a green digestive ointment, the other with a white cerate; and from one of these every patient, who is able, spreads his own plaister, on paper, if he has not brought his own lint or rag. On an average, the doctors dress one hundred and forty persons daily.’50 What they were dispensing was a form of healing sticking plaster, and recipes abounded for making such plaster at home. For superficial wounds court-plaister wrapped in paper was sold, made from silk or cotton coated with adhesive isinglass (a form of gelatine) – ‘ladies’ court-plaister’ cost sixpence, and other types of plaister sold by apothecaries included ‘corn plaister’ for feet and ‘family plaister’.51 Woodforde kept this sort at home: ‘My servant Will has a bad leg owing to its being scalded two days ago…I put to it some family plaister and a poultice over it.’52
Broken bones could heal if there were no complications, and farriers were usually willing to help. The Whitworth Doctors were renowned as bonesetters, but in hospitals the incidence of infection meant that amputation was often the best solution. Any complicated breaks that could not be set or dealt with by amputation were effectively untreatable. In February 1796 Woodforde heard news of the death of a relative: ‘Nancy had a letter this evening from Miss Pounsett brought from Norwich…The death of my Uncle Thos. Woodfordes wife occasioned by a late fall she met with, wch. broke one of her thigh bones, and being at an advanced age, above 84, could not be set.’53
Because manual labour was so physically demanding, working-class people often suffered from hernias, usually referred to as ruptures. Hernias occurred where an organ protruded into another part of the body, generally part of the intestine through the abdominal wall. The army and navy, although constantly short of men, refused to accept new recruits with hernias. Little could be done for this distressing condition except to wear a supporting truss. Different models were devised, and in 1805 George Barwick, a gunmaker at Norwich, advertised: ‘Elastic Steel Trusses and Bandages, OF EVERY DESCRIPTION, For Ruptures in Men, Women, & Children…Hundreds have been made by him, and many entirely cured…These Trusses, Bandages, &c. for Groin, Navel, and other Ruptures, are made on a superior plan, and worn without any inconvenience whatever.’54
That same year saw the founding of the New Rupture Society, whose aim was to provide the poor with effective trusses. One report stated: ‘at least one person in fifteen is ruptured: but among those classes of the community which are much exposed to laborious employment, the average may be fixed at one in eight or nine [and]…in some particular parishes, the proportion may be computed at even a fourth of the labouring population!’55 At least a quarter of a million people (perhaps many more) suffered from a rupture at any one time.
The Whitworth Doctors, Catherine Hutton said, also helped patients with constipation, for which ‘Glauber salts were bought by the hogshead’56 – naturally occurring salts that were used as a laxative. This was an age when many people’s diet was poor, not helped by the state of their teeth. There were no trained dentists, but from the 1770s dentistry was becoming a respectable profession, and surgeons such as John Hunter were undertaking research and publishing their results on the subject. Cavities in teeth could be filled with lead, silver or gold, but most sufferers had their painful teeth extracted. In London and large towns surgeons were available to pull out teeth, but elsewhere apothecaries, quack tooth-drawers and even blacksmiths might oblige. At Weston Longville in June 1776 Woodforde had a tooth removed by the farrier:
My tooth pained me all night, got up a little after 5 this morning and sent for one Reeves, a man who draws teeth in this parish, and about 7 he came and drew my tooth but shockingly bad indeed, he broke away a great piece of my gum and broke one of the fangs of the tooth, it gave me exquisite pain all the day after and my face was swelled prodigiously in the evening and much pain. Very bad and in much pain the whole day long. Gave the old man that drew it however 0.2.6. He is too old, I think, to draw teeth, can’t see very well.57
Years later Jane Austen accompanied three of her nieces to a more reputable dentist in London, as she related to Cassandra:
The poor Girls and their Teeth!…we were a whole hour at Spence’s, and Lizzy’s were filed and lamented over again and poor Marianne had two taken out after all, the two just beyond the eye teeth, to make room for those in front. When her doom was fixed, Fanny, Lizzy and I walked into the next room, where we heard each of the two sharp hasty screams. Fanny’s teeth were cleaned too – and pretty as they are, Spence found something to do to them, putting in gold and talking gravely…I would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth and double it.58
When living near Liverpool in 1808, Nelly Weeton had four teeth removed, as she told a friend:
I might have been Boreas [god of the north wind] himself, with one cheek, it was so puffed, and had you met me, you would have seen that cheek almost half a mile before you saw the other…However, as I am a great advocate of equality, I sent for Mr. Aranson, who extracted four teeth, and the operation soon reduced the great cheek to the level of its neighbour. Since that time, I have been in perfect good health, equally good spirits, and, (if you will believe me) in a good humour.59
Mr Pascoe Aranson was a surgeon-dentist who practised at Liverpool but also offered his services elsewhere for short periods. Two weeks after Nelly’s extractions, he was advertising in the Leeds Mercury that ‘he Purposes spending a few Weeks in Leeds, and any Lady or Gentleman who may favour him with their Commands, will please to address him at his Lodgings, at Mr. Hodgson’s, Tea-Dealer, No. 2 Boar-Lane.’60 Aranson claimed to provide a range of services ‘without the least pain or Injury to the enamel…Mr. A. is also noted for Drawing Teeth, with the greatest Ease, and extracts stumps, even if covered with the Gum.’61
When most people smiled, they displayed rotten teeth and gaps where teeth were missing. Holland complained that one man, by the name of Briffet, had ‘a mouth as wide as a barn door and lips as thick and projecting they look like two rollers of raw beef bolstered up to guard as it were the approach to his nasty rotten ragged teeth. However he is a good pig killer.’62 For many afflicted with toothache, it must have been a blessing when they lost all their teeth. Dorothy Wordsworth noted in May 1802: ‘My tooth broke today. They will soon be gone.’63 Already at the age of thirty, she was facing the prospect of no teeth.
Some chose to have a rogue tooth rammed back into place, and Colonel Peter Hawker in March 1812 wrote of this brutal experience: ‘After being tortured for three days and three nights with the toothache, I had a tooth drawn and driven in again, by which severe operation you effectually remove all pain (by destroying the nerve), and at the same time restore the tooth for mastication.’64 An a
lternative solution for front teeth was to insert a dead person’s tooth. ‘I would recommend to every dentist to have some dead teeth at hand,’ wrote the surgeon John Hunter, ‘that he may have a chance to fit the socket. I have known these sometimes last for years, especially when well supported by the neighbouring teeth.’65
Another possibility was a live tooth transplant, which was fashionable for a few decades from the 1770s. As a desperate way of earning money, a pauper might allow a sound front tooth to be extracted, which was then implanted in a wealthy patient. Transplanted teeth could transmit diseases like syphilis, but Hunter did not understand this risk: ‘the new teeth should always be perfectly sound, and taken from a mouth which has the appearance of that of a person sound and healthy; not that I believe it possible to transplant an infection’.66 In order to avoid filing the tooth to the correct shape, he said, the ‘best remedy is to have several people ready, whose teeth in appearance are fit; for if the first will not answer, the second may’.67
A few women practised medicine, usually alongside their husband as apothecaries, surgeons, oculists, opticians or dentists, or perhaps continuing a business on his death. In the 1770s and 1780s Mrs de St Raymond was a dentist in York and London, and on occasions she went to Winchester for short periods, as in January 1782:
MRS. DE ST. RAYMOND, DENTIST, at Mr. SHEPPARD’s, fronting the White Lion, High-street…She takes judiciously away from the teeth all Tartarous Concretions, destructive to them and the gums: draws and transplants teeth, and extracts stumps, be they ever so difficult, even when the skills of others proves ineffectual. She fills up and fastens teeth…fits in either human or artificial Teeth, from one to an entire set; and executes her newly invented Obturators for the loss of the Palate.68
Artificial teeth or dentures were crafted from a single piece of bone, ivory or porcelain, but none was satisfactory, as bone and ivory had no enamel coating and so became discoloured and decayed rapidly, and porcelain was noisy, lost its glaze and tended to shatter. The best dentures were constructed from human teeth taken from corpses and set on an ivory or animal-bone base, but these were expensive to manufacture. Lower dentures were more commonly made than upper ones because they could be securely fitted.
The battles of the Napoleonic Wars provided many opportunities for obtaining human teeth and satisfying a great demand amongst the wealthy for dentures. In 1814, during the Peninsular Wars, the London surgeon Astley Cooper sent a man by the name of Butler to his nephew Bransby Cooper in Spain in order to obtain teeth. When Bransby asked him how this was to be achieved, Butler replied: ‘Oh, Sir, only let there be a battle, and there’ll be no want of teeth. I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down.’69 Bransby noted that some of the legitimate sutlers were also bodysnatchers who followed the army to strip teeth and other valuables from the dead:
They generally obtained the teeth on the night succeeding the battle, only drawing them from those soldiers whose youth and health rendered them peculiarly fitted for the purposes to which they were to be employed. Nothing but the large sums of money derived from the depradations could have prompted them to encounter the risk…for I do not believe a soldier in the whole army would have hesitated one moment to blow out the brains of a person whom he found robbing the corpse of a comrade in this manner.70
At the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, over eighteen thousand men died on the battlefield itself,71 and they were ruthlessly plundered. Clients back in England were happy to wear dentures made from the teeth of fit young men killed in battle, which became known as ‘Waterloo teeth’ or, more coyly, ‘Waterloo ivory’. They would have been less happy to learn that many dentures were actually made from teeth plundered from English graveyards.
Bodysnatchers mainly sold bodies to anatomists for dissection, but they also sold teeth to dentists or surgeon-dentists. Even if a body was putrefying and no good for the anatomists, its teeth could still be taken. Joseph Naples, a former able seaman in the Royal Navy, recorded in a diary his gang’s activities in London, which included sales of ‘canines’ (sets of teeth). After obtaining some corpses in November 1812, Naples noted that Jack, one of his gang, ‘sold the canines to Mr. Thomson for 5 Guineas’.72 According to Bransby Cooper, ‘Every dentist in London would at that time purchase teeth from these men and the public can have but little idea of the immense sums of money which persons thus occupied could earn.’73
False teeth and trusses were not the only aids and accessories available. With amputations being the remedy for some injuries, wooden legs used with wooden crutches provided some mobility. Invalids, particularly at Bath, were carried about in sedan chairs, as well as in three-or four-wheeled ‘Bath chairs’ with folding hoods. Constructed by coachmakers, they could be manoeuvred by one person, rather than the two chairmen needed for sedan chairs. Benjamin Silliman noticed these chairs in Bath and described how ‘infirm people are drawn about by servants, in little hand carriages, with three wheels; a pair of wheels is placed behind, in the usual manner, and the third beneath the middle of the carriage before [in front]; connected with this last there is a lever, passing to the hand of the invalid, who is thus enabled to steer the vehicle.’74
For those who were partially deaf, hearing trumpets could offer an effective solution, consisting of a flaring end and a long narrow tube that channelled sound when inserted into the ear. Problems with vision such as myopia could be corrected with spectacles, which had convex or concave glass lenses that were round in shape, though by the early 1800s an oval shape was preferred. The lenses were set in frames that were lodged on the nose or held in front of the eyes by means of a short handle (which might fold up and serve as a protective case). Other frames resembled the form of modern spectacles, with sides or arms that gripped the head. These were made from materials such as steel, silver, brass, whalebone, leather, horn and tortoiseshell.
Opticians stocked a range of lenses with different focal lengths, and clients picked the most suitable, at times choosing split lenses or ‘double spectacles’, an early form of bifocals.75 A quizzing glass (or ‘quizzer’) was a single lens in a frame that was held in the hand by a handle. Magnifying glasses that folded into a case were similar, but were for close work such as reading. Opticians also made mirrors and anything else that needed glass, from tooth mirrors for dentists to linen smoothers for laundry. Some even offered framing services for prints. Like dentists, a few opticians moved between towns, such as G. Lyons who advertised in the Hampshire Chronicle in 1802:
G. LYONS, OPTICIAN
RESPECTFULLY informs his numerous Friends he is arrived in Winchester with a large Assortment of SPECTACLES, to suit any Age or Sight; READING and OPERA GLASSES, TELESCOPES, MICROSCOPES, &c. &c. and being regularly Bred to the Science of Optics, will, he trusts, be enabled to give entire Satisfaction. N.B.– G.L. will stay about a Fortnight, and will attend any Lady or Gentleman, being applied to at the Three Tuns Inn, Gaol-Street.76
The poor would not have been able to afford spectacles and so had to live with eye defects, while somebody like William Holland owned more than one pair. On New Year’s Day 1809 he had to conduct an afternoon church service at Over Stowey, but found it too dark and gloomy to see clearly: ‘I begun the service so late and the evenings now so short and the fogg so thick and dark, that I knew not how to make out my sermon. I had two spectacles with me and one magnified more than the other, so I very deliberately put up one and took out the other and then went on, and by that means got through.’77
People of all classes wore hats and therefore had some protection against the sun, but sunglasses with green or blue tinted lenses were available. Chronic contagious conjunctivitis of the eyes known as ‘Egyptian ophthalmia’ afflicted soldiers fighting the French in Egypt after Napoleon’s invasion of 1798. It was brought back to England and transmitted to the civilian population, and William Darter recalled that in Reading and elsewhere in Berkshire ‘we had many…who were partially or wholly blind from opthalmia caught in the earlier war
in Egypt. Some of these invalids from the East could be easily distinguished from others on account of their wearing green shades or coloured glasses.’78 If left untreated, cataracts in the eye could also cause blindness, but some surgeons (oculists) carried out procedures to dislodge (‘couch’) or extract the affected lens.
With an inadequate understanding of the body, all surgery was risky. There were also no modern aids like blood transfusions and anaesthetics, although in the late 1790s the physician Thomas Beddoes and his assistant Humphry Davy tried out various gases on tuberculosis patients at the Pneumatic Institution in Hotwells, Bristol.79 Nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’) was found to relieve pain and cause sedation. ‘As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain,’ Davy wrote in 1800, ‘it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.’80 Despite these findings, more than four decades would elapse before nitrous oxide was used in anaesthetics for surgery and dentistry.81 Instead, patients were given alcohol or laudanum, their hands were tied together, and they were held down while the surgery was carried out. One of the keys to a successful operation was speed, otherwise the patient might die of shock or bleed to death.
Most types of surgery undertaken today were simply not attempted then, because infection could not be prevented, and survival rates were appallingly low. Surgery was limited mainly to the amputation of limbs, along with operations that were not too invasive, such as on cysts, some cancers, cataracts, strangulated hernias and bladder stones (by lithotomy). Although surgeons might strive after cleanliness, they did not realise that they were transmitting lethal bacteria from sources such as their instruments and dissected corpses. Surgery on private patients was done in their homes, a far safer environment than any hospital – wealthy people did not attend hospitals for any treatment whatsoever.
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